Athens owl tets and Alexander III tets were some of the most common ancient coins produced, so I wonder if the Romans ever used them in transactions or did they just hoard them as a store of wealth? Also, are there any hoards containing both Roman coins and these Greek tetradrachms?
Sorry readers and moderators. I don't know what happened when I hit "enter" The whole text I wrote had disappeared and the images reduced to thumbnails. What I had written, some of it anyway, was that in the market place coins issued as drachmas may have been exchanged or been accepted equally as denarii. These four coins I displayed were issued by Roman authorities as tetradrachmas and if issued to soldiers as pay or contractors for supplies for the army they may have been accepted in the market as multiples of denarii. The coins of Macedonia, the first two, were issued by Roman authorities (one a quaestor under Sulla) at the time of Roman occupation. The cistaphoric tetradrachma was tariffed at three denarii. The last, the Nero tetradrachma of Antioch, was so reduced in weight and debased it is hard to see an easy exchange between the two.
Never heard of a hoard mixing owls or alexanders with Roman denarii. Or even of a hoard of Attic owls found near Rome. In the list of all known hoards containing Attic owls, the nearest from Rome is IGCH 1905 in Pyrgi (today Santa Severa), the ancient port of the Etruscan city of Caere, only 37 km from the Forum. There were tets from Leontinoi, Messina, 3 from Syracuse and 4 from Athens. Its date is not clear : after 440 or 384 BC. At this time the Romans did not use silver coins yet, and there were even probably no Romans in Pyrgi: they did not establish a colony there before c. 200 BC.
I think the problem was: 1) These coins were roughly 300-400 years old by Caesar's time. Coins did circulate longer back then, but even substantially spread hoards like Reka Devnia (which in all likelihood was probably assembled over several generations) we seldom see coins more than 200 years apart. 2) The Attic standard didn't really survive the collapse of the Seleucid empire. The ~11g Cistophorus survived until the time of Hadrian, and the ~14g Egyptian tet stopped being fine silver under the later Ptolemies, and contained functionally zero silver by the end of the 2nd century. If the coins are not current legal tender, they are bullion, which leads us to 3) Between the late Republic and the end of the Crisis, the denarius' buying power was very weakly correlated to its fineness. Prices would of course inflate, but slow enough that the layfolk didn't always feel it. During the good times, people trust fiat currency because it isn't restricted by silly things like "not enough silver to make any more". Thus, if a farmer in former Athens/Macedonian territory found a hoard of silver, it would be in their best interest to try to melt it all down and turn it into denarii, rather than keep it as-is. Which is an interesting point - I wonder how often the good silver "barbarian" denarii were actually made by a Roman citizen/subject from a recovered hoard of Greek coins? IIRC, someone here once posted an imitative denarius that was actually higher purity than the real thing
Let's not also forget that the ancient world was full of coin collectors, and Athenian tets would probably have been as desirable as collectibles back then as they are today.
The 'new style' Athenian owls were produced from c. 165 to 42 BC. Athens was under Roman control from 146 BC. In that sense, "Romans" not only used owls but minted them.
